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Serge Wroclawski, a long-time contributor to OpenStreetMap, has posted a criticism of the management choices he believes are preventing the OpenStreetMap Foundation from fulfilling its mission (much like the Wikimedia Foundation):
I feel the OpenStreetMap project is currently unable to fulfill that mission due to poor technical decisions, poor political decisions, and a general malaise in the project. I'm going to outline in this article what I think OpenStreetMap has gotten wrong. It's entirely possible that OSM will reform and address the impediments to its success- and I hope it does. We need a Free as in Freedom geographic dataset.
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OpenStreetMap May be in Serious Trouble
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @05:18PM (5 children)
I'm a Microsoft hater, but I have to admit that Bing Maps is definitely prettier than Google Maps. Google Maps badly needs a style update.
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Wednesday February 21 2018, @05:30PM (1 child)
Google Maps needs a friggin' speedup.
If I have to search (or need to check foreign countries with non-latin names), I use Google maps.
But if I want to check a map (roads and trails), OpenStreetMap is an order of magnitude faster.
Every version of Google Maps adds bloat and slows down. e.g. Defaulting to 3D for the sat view is a giant waste of bandwidth, CPU and time.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday February 22 2018, @09:20AM
I was wondering why Google Maps had seemed to have gotten so slow. I remember being able to "drive" down a highway, almost realtime, with Google, whereas now I can only move so far, and wait so long before it re-renders. Forget "flying". Its almost like back on dialup.
So I use this thing like I used to use dialup. Pick something, wait for it to render. But, unlike a few years ago, I have a lot more things to pick from. Quantity of available info is through the roof. But getting it down is slow as molasses. Yet I have no trouble viewing the HD Youtube stuff until the ads come through... sometimes the dual HD streams of both ad and content will overload my older 2.3GHz single-core celeron.
My boss finally ditched his AT&T connection, that was advertised as being super-fast, but in practice often slower than dialup on a 33.6K modem, and got some sort of high speed connection from Spectrum. My CPU will peg now far before the Network limiting kicks in.
I do like the increased amount of info available, but I was hoping by now, I should have the capacity of "driving" anywhere, realtime, seeing on the screen about what I would have seen through the windshield. I am nowhere close to that.
Tourist with polaroid is more like what I get.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @05:33PM (2 children)
Yeah, google should make it all flat looking and hard to use like their other products.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:42PM (1 child)
Have you tried Bing Maps? It's actually attractive.
Yeah, their OS looks like total shit with that "Metro" interface and all, and really looks rather garish IMO, but Bing Maps isn't like that.
Now this doesn't mean that Bing Maps is actually more useful or functional or has better data, I'm just commenting on the aesthetics. I just looked at my local area on it (I don't normally use it), and while it's prettier than Google Maps, it's missing a bunch of details, such as a nearby rail-trail, a nature preserve, various businesses, etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by damnbunni on Wednesday February 21 2018, @11:12PM
The worst part about Bing Maps is that it killed Microsoft Streets and Trips.
S&T was a much more complex program with a lot of features most people would never need, but if you needed them, now you're just hosed.
Since Garmin bought Delorme and killed Street Atlas, the only real alternative now is something like Maptitude which certainly does the job, but it's $700.